I’m writing this from San Lawrenz in Gozo. It’s perhaps the best place of which you’ve never heard. While it’s getting towards thick coat weather back home in Northumberland, out here it’s well over 20Â°C every day. In fact, right now I’m under a parasol to prevent my skin getting burned.

Last year, in early 2014 while I still worked for Mozilla, we had planned to relocate here for six months. It didn’t work out in the end and we’ve since moved on – both literally and figuratively. It remains my second favourite part of the world (albeit of the parts I’ve visited so far).

Heading on holiday with your family is different from going on holiday with your wife. Last time, we were here for a long weekend to find a suitable house to rent and to figure out things like schools, tax, and transport. The children stayed back in England with my parents. Around the logistical stuff we spent time talking, drinking coffee and eating cake.

This time each day is simultaneously more relaxed and more structured. You have to be when looking after kids. Have they got enough sun cream on? How much sugar have they had today? When was the last time they had a drink of water? There’s always an element of lazing around the pool, but even that is tempered with a vigilance to ensure they don’t drown on your watch.

One of the most insidious things to happen to the family holidays over the last 10 years is always-on email. As this quotation from Bill Murray (found via Patrick Rhone) points out, holidays are for things outside of your usual routine:

âEveryone needs to take a vacation from the sort of automatic things you do, you know. The automatic things you do are basically those things that keep you from doing the better things you need to do.â (Bill Murray)

This holiday in been climbing rocks with my son, playing cars with my daughter, and playing cards with my wife. While they’re not spectacularly ‘different’ things, they’re qualitatively different from the automatic stuff I do at home.

It could be argued that typing this with my thumbs while my kids play in the pool (supervised by my wife) constitutes an ‘automatic thing’ I ordinarily do. Maybe so. But writing and reflecting is a useful creative act. It’s not checking my Twitter feed, Medium stats, or interacting via Slack. In fact, I’ve removed those three apps from my iPad Mini while I’m here.

Instead of deciding not to pack any electronic devices, the difference here is one of emphasis. My focus is on researching places we might visit (using the Web), sharing what we’re up to with family (Path), and playing the occasional asynchronous game with my wife (Words With Friends).Â

I’m not checking any email while I’m here. The accounts have ‘out of office’ auto-responders turned on, and I’ve deactivated them in the settings on all devices. Being on holiday is as much about mindset as it is about location.

I very much enjoy reading but it takes a while for me to unwind enough to enjoy the kind of books I really enjoy reading. Right now, about half-way through our holiday, I’ve reached the second level of holiday relaxation. There’s at least one more level, but that (in my experience) requires at last two weeks away in a tent. The first level, of course, is waking up in a bed other than your own after successfully negotiating the travel from your home to your destination.

When I’m at the second and third levels of relaxation I read philosophy. Or, at least, works that could be considered ‘philosophical’. This time I’m diving, somewhat arbitrarily, into Simone de Beauvoir’s work, ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’. I, fascinated by the topic, and it is, in fact, the subject of a paper I wrote with my thesis supervisor a few years ago, and a chapter in my book-of-the-thesis.Â

Every time I’m away from home for pleasure rather than business I think about the serendipity, random left-turns, and seeming acts of fate that brought me to this point. I’m satisfied with my life and am perhaps happier than I have ever been up to this point. Neverthreless, these days I’m worldly-wise enough to ‘make hay while the sun shines’ – financially, physically, and emotionally.

Right, I’d better go. My kids are asking me to join them in the pool. While I enjoy writing for public consumption, there’s no comparison when it comes to the joy they bring me!

Iâm going on holiday tomorrow. So, other than trying to cram these links into the TIDE podcast episode Iâm recording with guest co-host Oliver Quinlan tonight, I canât do anything with them in the near future.

Instead, I’ll dump them here. Consider it akin to a ‘rummage box’ at your favourite bookstore, but one in which you’re guaranteed to find a diamond in the rough. They’re in no particular order:

MediumÂ is the latest (kind-of) social network that people are joining en-masse. So every day I wake up to notifications that people have started following me. Great!

The question I then face is who should I follow back? Sometimes it’s easy because I know the person who’s followed me â either offline from events, online through other social networks, or both.

But if I don’t know someone, all I’ve got to go off is their profile. I don’t particularly care what people look like or what their name is. What I’m really interested in is what they do. How would following them add value to my life?

If you sign into Medium using Twitter, it pulls in your bio from there. I’m not sure about Facebook. Either way, you should ensure you have a short description of who you are and what you do.

Otherwise, what context is there for people making a decision as to whether you’re worth following?

I turn 35 soon. My wife, a full nine weeks older than me, has already reached that exact mid-point of her thirties.

This is the first birthday I’ll approach feeling the same age as my chronological years. Up to this point, I’ve always felt slightly older than I look. Now, with greying hair but a leaner, fitter body than I’ve had in a while, 35 feels about right.

My daughter is four. She’s just started school properly. At that age, things are experienced on a much more visceral level. Building work on our house has meant us spening the last few weeks staying at my parents’ house. Now the work is nearing completion she’ll stop sharing a bedroom with her brother and move into a room of her own.Â

To cope with all these changes in her life, she’s taken to carrying a toy dog around with her everywhere. The dog, of course, is a kind of comfort blanket. But it’s got me thinking. As adults, we too have connections and comforts that can soothe us. A great example of this for me is music. Like many people, I find certain songs have a huge emotional resonance, while others evoke a very definite sense of place.

Instead of stumbling upon these touchstones, Iâve begun to actively seek them out. For example, Iâve read how some people my age have found tea rituals helpful. I experimented by investing in a glass teapot. Now, Iâve built into my day watching jasmine pearls and chamomile flowers unfurl. Itâs wonderfully relaxing.

My aim with seeking out rituals and routines is to build a centredness, a stillness in my soul that allows me to be the best, most authentic version of myself. It also increases my overall capacity to get things done. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that the biggest impediment to success is less to do with talent, and more to do with emotion.

The top tweet links to an article by the entrepreneur behind an edtech startup. The bottom one is by my mate Dave Stacey, an educator.

In the article the entrepreneur defines what his start-up is focusing on in the following way:

Micro-learning is learning in short, focused bursts of information. For example, a typical micro-learning activity could be viewing a flashcard, memorizing a word, listening to a short podcast, watching a brief video or answering a series of questions in a quiz.

That's great, but it's just the easy, low-hanging fruit. Let's call it what it is: the stuff easiest to automate. Hardly revolutionary.

Today I received a badge from Oracle via Acclaim (Pearson). My understanding of an “open badge” is that it is transportable, yet I am having trouble taking my badge with me – right now it seems my only option is to display it on Acclaim’s website. Has anyone else had experience with Acclaim?

The chances are that, if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It’s a way of “representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.” It is, of course, what I’d call a ‘convenient fiction’ in that it approximates how technologies are adopted, but should be placed in the same category as long-range weather forecasts.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my working habits and how I get frustrated by either dealing with cutting-edge stuff or less interesting mainstream stuff. Perhaps one approach would be to try and spread my work across the Hype Cycle. This would mean for some work I’d be working near the ‘Technology Trigger’ part of the Hype Cycle, whereas for other I might be working in the Trough of Disillusionment.

So long as everything I’m focusing on is mission-based, there’s no reason why working across the Hype Cycle wouldn’t be an interesting challenge. It’s certainly something to think more about.

Oh, and for those interested, according to Gartner, ‘open micro credentials’ is right at the top of ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’… 😉

Just a quick one to say that there’s an upcoming version ofÂ Popcorn Time for Android TV that works pretty flawlessly and which you can grab here. If, like me, you’ve got a Nvidia Shield TV, you want the link that contains arm64 in the filename.

It’s a pretty stellar piece of work. Not only does Popcorn Time show up in the main menu (rather than via Sideload Launcher) but it integrates at a system level, replacing the Google Movies & TV recommendations (which are, frankly, rubbish).

I have to say I was insanely excited to receive my new Nvidia Shield TV. It’s a streaming TV/gaming combo that will power the games room in our new loft conversion when it’s finished in a couple of weeks. I went with the 16GB model instead of the 500GB version as all of the reviews said that a large Micro SD card would be better than spending the extra.

Learning my lesson from previous technology purchases, I bought all of the accessories available – namely an extra controller, the voice-enabled Bluetooth remote, and the (very suave) stand. This was made lighter on my pocket by using the new Barclays-backedÂ Bespoke Offers website that saved me Â£56 in total. It’s probably only available in the UK, but it was as easy as copy/pasting the Amazon link into a box on their site and buying through a supplier they found that was cheaper.

Once you’ve powered on the device you realise just how fast it is. There’s no lag on anything. It’s actually difficult to describe in words because we’re used to a slight. almost imperceptible, pause between actions on digital devices. There’s none of that here. Everything you’d expect from the streaming side of things is there, and you can download a small selection of certified-compatible Android games from the Google Play Store.

Diving into theÂ GeForce NOW menu is a smÃ¶rgÃ¥sbord of delights. There’s a plethora of games to play, and of course a parental controls menu to limit to various PEGI-rated age groups. I had a discussion with my kids as I was happy not to turn on parental controls (I don’t filter broadband in our home). However, they said they’d rather it was turned on to PEGI-7 so they don’t see inappropriate things. I didn’t know whether to be shocked, pleased, or bemused!

The real fun comes when you realise it’s running Android, so you can sideload anything you want. We wanted FIFA 16 Ultimate Team, which isn’t listed as a compatible game. Thankfully, it’s a pretty straightforward process. I just fired upÂ Android File Transfer on my Mac, connected the USB cable to the Nvidia Shield TV and dragged/dropped APK files over to the ‘Downloads’ folder.

I did have to go digging a bit, but here’s some links for those who want to do likewise:

Some games work but it’s almost impossible to proceed. An example of that would be the latest Need For Speed, where there’s no way to press ‘Continue’. FIFA 16 works pretty well, although it’s single-player and not quite as fluid as the PlayStation version we’re used to.

That being said, my eight year-old son in particular is delighted. He’s been playingÂ Red Bull Air Race, Riptide GP2, andÂ Minion Rush on and off all morning. There are some great multiplayer games, includingÂ Toybox Turbos – which is my four year-old daughter’s favourite (and which seems to be the direct descendant of the Micro Machines game I used to play 20 years ago).

All in all, it’s a wonderful little device. I’ve got a PS3 but this purchase was instead of a PS4. So far, I’m delighted with my investment.

It’s become almost de rigueur for forward-thinking knowledge workers to have a standing desk these days. In fact, some of them have gone so far as to have a treadmill desk – which must take some getting used to.

The reason for this shift is supposed to be health: standing is better for you than sitting, the logic goes, and sitting is the new smoking. Earlier this year, when I left Mozilla and set up as a consultant, I invested in a IKEA Bekant sit/stand desk. I’m really pleased with it and, along with the anti-fatigue mat I bought at the same time, I find it immensely beneficial to stand rather than sit while I’m working from my home office.

New research, however, suggests that standing isn’t actually any better for you than sitting. It’s the being sedentary that’s the killer:

“Our study overturns current thinking on the health risks of sitting and indicates that the problem lies in the absence of movement rather than the time spent sitting itself,” study author Melvyn Hillsdon of the University of Exeter said in a statement. “Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing.”

I welcome the correction to the ‘standing good, sitting bad’ over-simplification, but would point out that when you’re standing your more primed for movement than when you’re sitting. I’m much more likely to move around my office and/or pop into the house for something when I’m standing compared to when I’m sitting.